Posts Tagged ‘Airports’

Okay, the papers today have been full of the plan May announced yesterday that would improve the NHS over the next ten years. Apparently they’re going to increase funding by 20 billion pounds above inflation by 2023, recruiting tens of thousands of new nurses and doctors.

Mike today posted a piece ripping apart these promises. He makes the point that the Tories haven’t fulfilled their existing targets to recruit more medical staff. They have also not stated where they intend to fund the money to pump into the NHS.

More sinisterly, one key part of the programme discussed by Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock in an interview with Sophy Ridge sounded like the government is planning to blame poor health on the patients themselves. Hancock said in the interview that the government intended to shift towards helping people to stay health, to stop them getting ill as much as curing them.

Mike makes the point that this sound very much like the claims that the DWP helps people by refusing them benefit. He’s right. I think there has already been discussion of schemes whereby obese people should be refused medical treatment for diseases or conditions brought on by the condition.

Mike also makes the point that the fundamental problem of the Tories’ NHS policy is continuing regardless of their new plans. This is the privatization of the health service. Mike writes

As for privatisation – with more than £8 billion spent on private companies that have been allowed to buy into the NHS by the Conservatives since 2012, concern is high that the whole service in England is being primed for sale, to be replaced with a private insurance-based system, as poor as the schemes currently failing the citizens of the United States. These fears are supported by the fact that current NHS boss Simon Stevens used to work for a US-based health profiteer.

This new 10-year plan, it seems, is setting out to do exactly what Noam Chomsky described when discussing the steps leading to privatisation: Strip the service of funds, make sure it doesn’t work properly, wait for people to complain, and then sell it to private profit-making firms with a claim that this will improve the service.

He makes the case that the NHS will be treated exactly as the other privatized utilities – energy companies, railways, water industry and airports – stripped of funds, sold off, and owned by foreign firms to provide them with profits.

This also is true. Private Eye has reported how the Tories and New Labour were lobbied by private healthcare providers determined to gain access to the NHS, including the American private healthcare insurance fraudster, Unum.

He concludes

So you can look forward to a future in which you are blamed for any health problem that arises, and forced to pay through the nose for health insurance (that probably won’t cover your needs or won’t pay out at all, to judge by the American system).

It seems the Tories’ 10-year plan for the NHS is to trick you into an early grave.

The Tories have been determined to privatise the NHS since the days of Margaret Thatcher. She wanted to privatise it completely, but was stopped by a cabinet revolt. She nevertheless wanted to encourage Brits to take out private health insurance and began cutting and privatizing NHS services. This was continued under John Major by Peter Lilley, who invented the Private Finance Initiative in order to help private corporations gain access to the NHS. It carried on and was expanded even further by Blair and New Labour, and has been taken over and further increased by the Tories since the election of Cameron back in 2010.

If it continues, the NHS will be privatized, and the quality of Britain’s healthcare will be what is in the US: appalling. The leading cause of bankruptcy in America is inability to pay medical costs. Something like 20 per cent of the US population is unable to afford private medical insurance. 45,000 people a year die because they cannot afford healthcare treatment.

A year or so ago a Conservative commenter to this blog tried to argue that the Labour party had not established the Health Service and that the Tories were also in favour of it. Now it is true that the welfare state, including the NHS, was based on the Beveridge Report of 1944. Beveridge was a Liberal, and his report was based on the information and views he had been given in turn by civil servants and other professionals. But the Health Service itself was set up by Aneirin Bevan in Clement Attlee 1945 Labour government. The Health Service’s ultimate origins lay in the 1906 Minority Report into reform of the existing healthcare services by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The Socialist Medical Society had been demanding a nationalized system of healthcare in the 1930s, as had the Fabian Society, and this had become Labour policy in that decade. And later in the 1950s, after the NHS had been established, the Tory right again demanded its privatization on the grounds that it was supposedly too expensive. Even now this is the attitude of right-wing historians and politicians, like Corelli Barnet, who has said that the reason why Britain was unable to modernize its industry after the War like the Germans or French was because the money went instead to the NHS.

The same commenter also claimed that Britain never had a private healthcare system. This is untrue. Many hospitals were run by local councils, but there were also private charity and voluntary hospitals. And these did charge for their services.

I’ve put up pieces before about how terrible healthcare was in Britain before the NHS. Here’s another passage about the state of healthcare for Britain’s working class between the First and Second World Wars, from Eric Hopkins’ The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes 1918-1990: A Social History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1991)

The health services between the wars were still in a rudimentary state. Insurance against sickness was compulsory for all workers earning less than 160 per annum under the National Insurance Act of 1911 but the scheme did not cover the dependants of the insured, and sickness benefits when away from work were still lower than unemployment rates. Further, the range of benefits was limited, and hospital treatment was not free unless provided in poor law infirmaries. Treatment in municipal hospitals or voluntarily run hospitals still had to be paid for. The health service was run not by the Ministry of Health, but by approved societies, in practice mostly insurance societies. As a system, it suffered from administrative weaknesses and duplication of effort, and the Royal Commission on National Health Insurance 1926 recommended that the system be reformed; the Minority Report even recommended that the administration of the system be removed from the societies altogether. In 1929 the Local Government Act allowed local authorities to take over the poor law infirmaries, and to run them as municipal hospitals. Not many did so, and by 1939 about half of all public hospital services were still provided by the poor law infirmaries. By that year, it would be fair to say that there was something resembling a national health service for the working classes, but it was still very limited in scope (it might or might not include dental treatment, depending on the society concerned), and although treatment by general practitioners was free for those by the scheme, as we have seen, hospital treatment might have to be paid for. (pp. 25-6).

This what the Tories and the Blairites in New Labour wish to push us back to, although looking at that description in seems that even this amount of government provision of healthcare is too much for those wishing to privatise it completely.

The Tories’ claim to support and ‘treasure’ the NHS are lies. May is a liar, and has already lied about putting money into the NHS. I remember how She claimed that they were going to increase funding, while at the same time stating that the NHS would still be subject to cuts. And I don’t doubt that she intends to take this plan anymore seriously. It doesn’t mean anything. Look how she declared that austerity had ended, only to carry on pursuing austerity.

Defend the NHS. Get Tweezer and the Tories out, and Corbyn and Labour in.

I just found this very short clip on YouTube of Bruce Springsteen saying exactly what he thinks of Trump’s Muslim ban. He states that ‘Tonight we want to add our voice’ to the thousands of Americans protesting in airports around the country against the ban, the detention of foreign nationals and refugees. America is a land of immigrants, and the ban is fundamentally anti-democratic and un-American.

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that The Boss is against the Muslim ban. I got the distinct impression that his politics are left-wing, and that ‘Born in the USA’, far from being a flag-waving, patriotic anthem, is a condemnation of the way the American system treats its blue-collar workers, and then expected them to fight and die in the unjust war in Vietnam.

Here’s news of yet another petition against the Orange Fuhrer that’s being set up. In this short video – about four minutes long – Democracy Now’s anchor, Amy Goodson, talks to John Bonifaz, an attorney and political activist, about an anti-Trump petition his group has launched. It asks for Congress to impeach Trump because of his massive business interests. These place Trump in a conflict of interest, as he stands to profit personally from occupying the role of President, in violation of the law. There are two acts, which forbid the president from receiving any monies from foreign governments and from domestic organisations or individuals, which Trump has broken. He has been asked to divest himself of his companies, and refused. In fact, Mr Bonifaz states at one point that Trump is so massively corrupt, he’s actually worse than Nixon. Which is clearly going some, in stakes of Most Corrupt President Ever. Since the petition has been launched, it’s garnered nearly a quarter of a million signatures.

There’s a petition over here to stop the Orange Generalissimo coming to Britain on state visit because of his racist ban on Muslims entering the US. There are demonstrations against that law in airports across the US, and a Federal judge has ruled in unconstitutional. The Governor of Washington state has also denounced it as cruel, racist and economically damaging, and described the efforts his administration is making to ending it.

All around the world, people are coming together to force this malignant buffoon out of office. The people of America are showing that they’re not going to stand idly by while he tramples on the rights of fellow US citizens.

The major news story today has been the horrific suicide bombings in Brussels. Apart from the deaths and injuries this has caused, it’s also closed down plane, train, tram and bus communications, leaving thousands of people stranded in the Belgian capital. This has come after the capture at the week of Abdesalam, the ringleader of the Paris bombings last year.

The Young Turks’ anchor, Cenk Uygur, made a particularly acute observation about Abdesalam’s character. When the Paris police raided the terrorist’s headquarters, they found an unused suicide belt. It seems that Abdesalam was also due to blow himself to kingdom come along with the rest of the maniacs. But when it came to the crunch, he decided that he wasn’t quite ready to meet Allah in paradise just yet. No doubt he felt he still had too much good work to do still on Earth killing infidels down here before going to meet his maker.

Abdesalam was the ringleader. He planned the attack. His own brother was one of the fools he brainwashed into spattering his entrails, and, tragically, those of the bombers’ innocent victims all over the street. But not Abdesalam himself. He wasn’t going to kill himself, even if it meant killing the infidel. No way! And that, Uygur concluded, was what the leaders of these suicide bombers and terrorists are like. They’re cowards. They glory in the deaths of innocents, and the bloodthirsty maniacs they dupe into carrying out these mass murders, but they do not, under any circumstances, want to do it themselves. And when you get to the higher levels of the organisation, where it’s funded by rich Saudis, the motivation becomes even more cynical. The Saudi intelligence service was funding al-Qaeda and ISIS partly as a way of killing the Shi’a in Iraq and elsewhere, and as a method for grabbing control of Iraq’s oil. And just in case we forget, let’s pause for a minute to remember the monstrous hotel ISIS built in Mosul, or took over, to hold a bun fight for the organisation’s big wigs to contemplate their glorious conquests. I don’t believe for a single minute that these guys have any intention of joining the ordinary grunts on the front line and blowing themselves up. Not while they can, no doubt, enjoy all manner of delights haram to the rest of the faithful on Earth.

Uygur himself is Turkish, and he also pointed out that ISIS was also responsible for terrorist bombings in Istanbul. The people there deserved every bit as much sympathy and concern as those in Paris. And, as he might have said, Brussels.
Absolutely. Turkey has a lot of problems, but Uygur pointed out that it’s both an Asiatic and European country. It’s a country with a long, and fascinating history going all the way back almost to the very beginnings of Western civilisation in the Ancient Near East. And until recently, it also had very little terrorism.

ISIS are an affront to human civilisation, whether you’re Christian, secular, Jewish, Muslim or whatever. They’re cowards and butchers who delight in getting others to kill and maim, but have absolutely no intention of getting themselves caught doing so. Our prayers and best wishes to the peoples of France, Belgium and Turkey. May it not be too long before the vile creatures behind these atrocities are caught and brought to justice.

Private Eye in their issue for 5th-18th September 2008 printed this piece listing the companies sponsoring the Tory party conference that year.

Meet the Tories’ Brum Chums

The Conservative party conference will see Team Cameron entertaining a plethora of wealthy bedfellows from industry when it kicks off in Birmingham on 28th September …

The Arms trade…
Labour have been too embarrassed to be seen mixing with the weapons makers, but if shadow defence secretary Liam Fox becomes a real minister all that will change. Fox is timetabled to speak for the Defence Industries Council, an arms trade group led by BAE Systems chief executive Mike Turner.

Fox shares the enthusiasm of the “Vulcan” wing of the US Republicans for military reaction to perceived threats, reflected in the title of another meeting he is addressing on “Resurgent threats: Terror, Russia and Iran?” The meeting is sponsored by yet another arms firm, EADS, who hope to sell loads of kit to a future Tory government.

The Greens…
Cameron is fighting to make green a new Tory, colour, but it’s a very pale shade indeed. The Tory Green Initiative’s first meeting at the conference is paid for by the British Cement Association and has cement lobbyist Mike Gilbert on the platform. The link makes the TGI look more like an industry-friendly lobby group than an environmental campaign. Hardly surprising, as the Initiative is run by Nick Wood-Dow, the boss of lobbying firm Chelgate, which assists clients from the construction industry who have problems with “disproportionate response from the community, or from pressure or environmental groups.”

The Poor…
Shadow Treasury minister Mark Hoban is demonstrating the new Conservative interest in poverty with a meeting on the credit crunch, sponsored by Cattles plc, one of the Britain’s leading sub-prime lenders. Cattles makes millions through its “Shopacheck” loans to the low-paid that have APRS as high as 400 per cent.

The Lobbyists…
Last year Tory MP Peter Luff was outraged that the Canary Wharf Group gave £120,000 to Labour while promoting Crossrail, the line that will improve access to Canary Wharf. Boris Johnson also backs Crossrail, and Luff will presumably be horrified that the Canary Wharf Group is paying the London Assembly Conservatives. The group is funding a political “speed dating” lunch, where delegates can meet “the most influential people in London politics, from London Assembly members to deputy mayors.”

Elsewhere, shadow Treasury bod Mark Hoban is advertised as the top speaker at the “invitation-only financial services reception” of lobby firm Lansons, which makes a living from trying to influence politicians on behalf of big-money clients such as HBOS bank. It’s easy to see why Lansons has invited a shadow minister to their party, but harder to see why Hoban would accept.

The list of curious sponsors goes on: shadow health minister Stephen O’Brien is speaking on problem drinking – sponsored by brew SAB Miller. And Frances Maude, a key member of Team Cameron, is speaking on “Preparing for Power” – that to money from management consultants PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

…and the Labour ex-ministers
Of course, the Tories aren’t the only one who know on which side their bread is buttered – three former Labour ministers will address the conference, getting in practice at sucking up to Cameron’s crew. Former trade minister Brian Wilson was once a left-wing MP and enthusiastic supporter of Castro’s Cuba; now he is chairman of the pro-airports lobby group FlyingMatters. Steven Twigg, the man once famous for defeating Portillo, and former Culture secretary Chris Smith complete the trio.

Those were the companies seeking to profit from the Tories gaining power that year. And looking at this, and the way Cameron very swiftly dropped his Green initiative when it appeared to have worked, it’s clear that this always was a sham. His Green Initiative was simply an astroturf organisation to get the Tories and their backers in the very un-Green cement industry back into No. 10. And since then, the Tories have dropped it completely. Cameron took down that windmill from his house, and has put his full support behind fracking, another industry which comprehensively wrecks the environment.

David Cameron is still firmly behind the arms industry. He was up at the BAE systems base the other week in Wharton, boasting about how he’d sold millions of their products to the war criminals and mass murderers in Saudi Arabia. He wasn’t bothered, calling their armaments ‘brilliant things’.

And the hypocrisy and deceit behind their lobbying bill, which shuts out charities and other organisations from influencing government, while leaving the real lobbyists to pursue their sordid trade, should be no surprise given their appearance sponsoring so much of the Tory conference.

And then there’s the matter of the 95 Tory and Lib Dem ministers with links to health care companies, who are hoping to get rich from the privatisation of the NHS.

British Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George, used government work creation schemes to combat unemployment.

A few weeks ago, Alittleecon on his blog suggested that unemployment could be combatted through a government programme of public works. The unemployed could be retrained as the workers and professionals the economy needs, and the scheme would itself stimulate further economic growth. The money spent by the government would thus pay for itself several times over. See his post, ‘If the Private Sector’s Not Doing It, Doesn’t Mean Its Not Worth Doing’ at http://alittleecon.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/if-the-private-sectors-not-doing-it-doesnt-mean-its-not-worth-doing/

Alittleecon is very definitely a person of the left, and governments across the political spectrum under the influence of Keynsian economic have adopted similar public works programmes to stimulate the economy. The Japanese government, for example, has embarked on a massive campaign of road construction, as well as building airports and other parts of the transport infrastructure in order to counter the massive depression their economy experienced in the late 1990s and noughties.

Oswald Mosley and Government Public Works for Creating Employment

The British would-be Fascist dictator, Oswald Mosley, also recommended using a programme of public works and employee retraining to tackle unemployment in his 1968 autobiography, My Life (London: Thomas Nelson). He wrote:

The other sphere in which the government must give a decisive lead is in the organisation of public works on a great scale. In an island or even a continental economy overheating, with the result of inflation, can occur in a condition of full employment. On the other hand, to maintain a large pool of unemployment is inhuman and disastrous to the general morale. The answer to this dilemma of the present system is to avoid overheating and inflation by the restraints of credit policy, while taking up the consequent slack of unemployment in public works. No man should be unemployed, and work should be available to all on a reasonable standard of life in a large public works programme, but there should be sufficient differential to provide incentive to return as soon as possible to normal employment; re-training and re-deployment of labour schemes should always accompany of public works system.

Public works should now be in active preparation in all Western countries to replace in due time the distortions of the economy of the Western world, which are initially caused by the semi-wartime basis of America. When peace finally breaks out, we should be ready with the constructive works of peace to replace the destructive works of America’s small wars and the concomitant arms race. The inflationary movement, resting largely on America’s deficit financing of its wars and arms, can at any time come abruptly to an end, either through peace of the objections of other nations to this financial process. So far, armament race and minor wars have taken up the slack of unemployment which would normally represent the difference between modern industrial potential and effective market demand. This has only been done by distorting the economy and aggravating the eventual problem of peace. To maintain full employment in a real period of peace only two methods are available – inflation, or public works on a great scale. We have already seen the results of inflation in an overheated economy leading to over-full employment, and wages chasing prices in a vicious spiral whose end must be a crash.

The only alternative is a stable price level maintained by a strong credit policy, with the resultant unemployment taken up in public works. The economic effect of public works in dealing with unemployment can be the same as the armament boom, without the disastrous exaggeration of deficit financing. Yet the difference in national, or I hope continental, well-being can be vital. The public works of peace can be integrated in general economic policy and can serve it rather than distort it. State action can prepare the way in works too large for private enterprise, and can thus assist rather than impede it. Such public works of peace in terms of unemployment policy can replace abnormal armament demand, can build rather than damage the economy, can benefit the nation and reduce the menace to mankind. (pp. 493-4).

He also recommended that the government public works programme should be used to replenish and upgrade the housing stock in a campaign of slum clearance and house building to provide homes for young people unable to get on the property ladder.

There is no such waste of wealth and the human spirit as unemployment. It is avoidable, and in a continental economy easily avoidable; it is simply a question of the mechanics of economics which mind and will can master. When demand flags, the market falters and unemployment follows, but we should remember there is no ‘natural’ limit to demand; the only limitation is the failure of our intelligence and will. It sounded fantastic long ago in the House of Commons when a wise Labour leader of clear mind and calm character, J.R. Clynes, said there is no limit to real demand until every street in our cities looks like the front of the Doge’s Palace at Venice; and not even then. He was quite right, there is no limit to demand, only to our power to produce, and then to organise distribution. Certainly, there is no limit to demand while the slums disgrace our main cities and young married couples have to live with their parents for lack of accommodation. for years I have urged a national housing programme like an operation of war; the phrase was picked up and used long after as what is called a gimmick in contemporary politics; yet nothing was done about it. I meant it, and it can be done. (p. 495).

There is nothing uniquely Fascist about this programme. Mosley was an early convert to Keynsianism, and took his idea of using public works to combat unemployment from Lloyd George. In the ‘Mosley Memorandum’ he issued in 1929 when he was a member of the Labour party, he recommended using a mixture of public works and purchasing credits issued to the population as a means of stimulating the economy. Economists looking at this policy since then have given their approval, and believed that it would have worked. This does not, of course, justify anything else Mosley advocated, such as the megalomania that saw him as the future British dictator, the hatred of democracy and liberal British institutions, the violence, the bizarre ideas of using evolution to create a new, higher human type, and the poisonous and vicious racism and anti-Semitism that would have led Mosley in power to create an apartheid state. Despite Mosley’s claims to the contrary, his biographer, Stephen Dorril, has stated that if he had come to power and allied with Nazi Germany, then he would have become an accomplice in Hitler’s genocide of the Jews.

Louis Blanc and 19th Century National Workshops in France

In fact, the use of public works as a means of lowering unemployment was used as early as 1848 in France. The pioneering French Socialist, Louis Blanc, had recommended setting up a system of ‘National Workshops’ to provide jobs for unemployed workers, who would be paid at the rate of two Francs a day. The profits made from these jobs would be used to purchase more workshops until the economy was completely socialised. This met with very strong opposition from the French government, including the minister charged with implementing the policy. Blanc was not included on the five-man Executive Commission which replaced the provisional government. the Comte de Falloux, the leading spokesman for the Conservative right, attacked the Workshops because he believed they constituted the threat of working class, Socialist revolution. The jobs created were thus pointless, miserably paid tasks like digging ditches, only to fill them in at the end of the day and the Workshops themselves were later closed down in June 1848.

A proper policy today of creating new jobs through public works and retraining, such as that recommended by Mosley, would almost certainly be strongly opposed by the current political class. It contradicts Neoliberal dogma that private enterprise is always better for the economy and society, and that state interference should be as limited as possible. Obama’s bail-out of the American banks and his policies designed to combat the recession that followed, have been strongly attacked by Libertarians. Following von Hayek and Mises, they see government policies as making the crisis worse and prolonging it. It would also be attacked for contradicting the government’s austerity programme, and the automatic assumption that the only fiscally responsible course of action to adopt in a recession is to cut public expenditure. I also have no doubt that some of the arguments used against such a policy would be that it was recommended and used by Fascist dictators and leaders like Mussolini, Hitler and Mosley.

Workfare Not Programme to Create Jobs, but Supply Cheap Labour to Industry

Nevertheless, there is the expectation that the government should act positively to combat unemployment, rather than leave the economy to correct itself automatically. The various job creation schemes like the Youth Opportunities Programme in the 1980s, and the Work Programme, as well as various internships and trainee schemes launched by private industry in partnership with the government are proof of this. So also are the various retraining schemes that have also been launched by successive administrations, like the computer courses Blair set up for the unemployed. The Coalition has, however, tried to avoid actually creating any real jobs directly through the use of private contractors. Instead of unemployment being created through the economy and the structure of society, the Tories and Tory Democrats instead have adopted the old Victorian view that it is caused by the idleness or moral weakness of the jobless themselves. Hence the bullying and humiliation by jobcentre staff and the system of sanctions, ostensibly intended to motivate the unemployed to look harder for work. Neoliberal economics recommends a constant unemployment rate of 6 per cent to keep wages low, and the Work Programme, internships and trainee schemes, as well as various apprenticeship programmes are structured not to create work, but to keep the contracting business supplied with cheap labour. They are intended to present the illusion that the government is seriously tackling the problem of unemployment, while really doing as little as possible to tackle it seriously.

These highly exploitative schemes should be discontinued, and the government instead should embark on a genuine programme of state job creation following the interventionist ideas of Louis Blanc, Lloyd George and Keynes. But I doubt this will ever occur. It would contradict decades-old Thatcherite notions of what constitutes government expenditure, as well as outrage the Conservatives and big business with the prospect of a revived, working class, which would not have to depend on private industry for the privilege of obtaining unpaid or low paid jobs.